Version 2.4 of the OpenOffice productivity suite was released on Thursday, boasting enhancements to all its core components. Possibly the most significant alteration in the new version of the free suite is in the description of file types. The 'OpenDocument' description has been replaced by 'ODF', which stands for 'OpenDocument Format' and is becoming a well-known acronym thanks to rivalry with Microsoft's controversial OOXML format.

There's one huge improvement in OOo 2.4 from my point of view: better language switching support. Most of what I write is in English, some of it's in Dutch. In previous versions the only way to change the language setting for a document was going through the options dialogue, and it was next to impossible to set multiple languages in a single document and have the spelling checked properly in each.

In OOo 2.4 it's a piece of cake to switch between various languages, whether it is for an entire document, a paragraph or two, or even a single word. That ability was the only thing I still missed from MS Office occasionally (though fortunately it was never more than a minor annoyance).

I haven't had much time with 2.4 yet, so I haven't noticed any other major differences. Having said that, this one feature is more than enough to make me very happy indeed about the update.